Cities Leveraging Analytics Platforms to Work Smarter, Not Harder

Cities, like corporations, are pursuing data-driven approaches to improve safety and efficiency. This analysis examines how municipal governments are implementing analytics platforms to make better decisions about infrastructure, public services, and urban development.

Corporations are not alone when it comes to gathering and interpreting data, and taking action based on the insights gleaned from the data. Increasingly, cities are pursuing and implementing tools to collect, make sense of, and act based on population and infrastructure-oriented data to improve urban efficiency and safety—to make cities work better for all of its constituents. The concept of “smart cities” has increased in popularity as a result, acting more as a catch-all for the kinds of innovations that ultimately ladder-up to these macro urban efficiency and safety goals. Helping Cities Work Smarter, Not Harder In their current form, smart cities leverage an amalgamation of technologies that mostly surround security, web proofing, and city development. At a high level, the key findings from the data collected can help city officials improve fluidity and safety. Cities are able to use data in order to work smarter, not harder, meaning that the data urban planners and organizations are analyzing can be used to more accurately identify and address infrastructure, transportation, and safety challenges facing the city. These data sets also give local governments and urban planning organizations the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of constituents, including how they behave, travel, and engage with their local ecosystems. “ Data is what puts the smart in smart service ,” according to Khaled Charif, the director of technology and innovation at NXN, a company that provides consulting services for the GCC, a contracting company in Dubai. Charif continues, “We are talking about both historical and real-time data. So in that sense, a smart building will have relevant and contextual data readily available when it comes to a specific service such as to avail a concierge service, to book a parking spot or to manage a security alarm.” Analytics Applied: The Cases of Jaipur and Kansas City Stakeholders involved in designing and executing a broad smart city agenda i

By Fred Hoch at TechNexus Venture Collaborative